Rarely Heard: Borbetomagus - Barbed Wire Maggots

In the late 70s into the 80s I used to get the irregular mail order list from Recommended Records (RecRec), run by members and affiliates of Henry Cow, which was full of avantgarde and outsider bands and musicians. It was truly a list of recommendations, and the descriptions of the albums made one curious about the music. One of the bands they championed were Borbetomagus, and I really had to get one of their albums just to hear what they were like. The band is essentially the New York-based trio of Jim Sauter, Don Dietrich and Donald Miller (and occasional guests), and you could call their work free jazz, but they have gone way beyond that and were playing an industrial-inspired form of free noise unsurpassed by any band at the time. The album Barbed Wire Maggots was my choice, an album consisting of one album-length improvisation, and it sounded (and still does sound) like nothing else I had ever heard. They still are playing to this day, and Thurston Moore (a great fan of the band) has participated in several more recent albums. A mischievous joke of mine: everytime somebody tells me "I'm a big jazz expert" I ask them about Borbetomagus. Indeed, they are rarely heard of. Btw, Recommende Records still exists at http://www.rermegacorp.com.